- So we have this great spreadsheet from the UN…and it has all kinds of wonderful data in it.…And it has stuff in here,…for instance the Gender Inequality Index,…the Gender Related Development Index,…Multidimensional Poverty Index.…Table after table after table.…Really interesting stuff…but we can't really make a single illustration…to capture all of that.…So as I mentioned earlier,…I'm really gonna focus on just a few things.…I'm gonna focus on the overall Human Development Index,…HDI for each country.…

I'm gonna focus on the three components…that make up the HDI for each country.…Life expectancy, education and income.…I'm gonna focus on the Human Development Index trends,…right, how it's changed over many years.…As well as the Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index.…How does inequality in different countries…affect each country's score and rank.…So, if we just limit it to that,…all I want to do with the spreadsheet first…is really narrow down to the data…to adjust those pieces that I need to work with.…

So, I'm gonna go over here.…

Resume Transcript Auto-Scroll

Author

Released

3/26/2015

Making "big picture" data relevant for a general audience is a challenging yet common design job. Data visualizations are great solutions; they can illustrate important global issues and bring some of the interesting stories in the data to light.

The UN Human Development Index used in this course is a perfect example: a composite number used to rank countries on how well they're doing across a range of measures (such as health, wealth, and education). Instructor Bill Shander shows how to make this index data tangible and approachable by imagining the story and visual approach first. He then builds the design in Adobe Illustrator, capitalizing on some automation and scripting abilities the program offers. Start watching for unique insights into the entire data visualization process.

Topics include:

Working with the data

Sketching and wireframing your design

Roughing out the visual design components

Manually creating the design in Illustrator

Using Illustrator scripting to improve accuracy, speed, and repeatability